Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

if you want to talk about presentation of news and information, the basic structure is that there are what are sometimes called “agenda-setting” media: there are a number of major media outlets that end up setting a basic framework that other smaller media units more or less have to adapt to.

Operation MONGOOSE. Right after the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt failed, Kennedy launched a major terrorist operation against Cuba [beginning November 30, 1961]. It was huge—I think it had a $50 million-a-year budget (that’s known);

it’s only natural that powerful interests wouldn’t want to support genuinely alternative structures—why would an institution function in such a way as to undermine itself? Of course that’s not going to happen.

Well, what we’ve been discussing are simply the institutional factors that set the boundaries for reporting and interpretation in the ideological institutions. That’s the opposite of conspiracy theory, it’s just normal institutional analysis, the kind of analysis you do automatically when you’re trying to understand how the world works. For people

From reading today’s newspapers, I think there’s been a definite shift to the right. See, I don’t agree with that. People do have that illusion, but I think it’s because their perspective has shifted to the left—and that runs across most of the population,

the “Propaganda Model” actually has a fair amount of elite advocacy. In fact, there’s a very significant tradition among elite democratic thinkers in the West which claims that the media and the intellectual class in general ought to carry out a propaganda function—they’re supposed to marginalize the general population by controlling what’s called

on major issues there is a very noticeable split between elite and popular opinion, and the media consistently reflect elite opinion. So for example, on things like, say, dismantling welfare state programs, or on a nuclear weapons freeze, or on U.S. policies in Central America in the 1980s, or on the nature of the Vietnam War, the views expressed i

In fact, that’s almost certainly what the Iran part of the Iran-contra affair was about. The arms shipments to the Iranian military didn’t have anything to do with a secret deal to release American hostages [held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon beginning in 1985], and they didn’t have anything to do with “October Surprises” either, in my view [the

discussing the “Propaganda Model” would itself be dysfunctional to the institutions, so therefore it simply is excluded. The “Propaganda Model” in fact predicts that it won’t be discussible in the media.